Ribeira Sacra An Incomplete Collection of Observations and Considerations Round One… Written by Ted Vance Summer 2020 The Ribeira Sacra is complicated. There is so much more than what is readily apparent beyond the breathtaking imagery of vertigo-inducing vineyard terraces towering over the silvery, slow-moving rivers far below. Broken up into five general wine regions, it has a greater diversity of grapes, expositions, altitudes, slope angles, bedrock types and topsoil compositions than many other wine regions. This subject is expansive and thankfully, there is now increasingly more useful information about it, thanks to Spanish wine journalism that has begun to focus more heavily on Spain’s backcountry. Luis Gutiérrez, from the Wine Advocate, the team at spanishwinelover.com blog, and the website of importer, Jose Pastor Selections, are some of my go-to references written in English. One challenge of delving deep into this region comes from the fact that much of its history has been lost for generations to hard times and nearly complete abandonment. The bulk of the historical and cultural details are in Spanish, or even the far more challenging Galician—also called Galego, a regional dialect that combines elements of Spanish and Portuguese with its own individual twist. My goal here is to offer a better understanding of the Ribeira Sacra by highlighting some unique elements within each of the five subzones from a broad, terroir-oriented perspective. Climatic Considerations The Ribeira Sacra represents Galicia’s climatic middle ground, with a large variation throughout the appellation that ranges from one extreme side to the other. The climate dictates the “success” of grapes’ growth with regard to the degree of balanced phenolic ripeness they attain. It may seem unusual, but in Galicia there are many different grape types that find balanced phenolic ripeness in a great range of potential alcohol levels, some as low as 10.5%, and others well above 13%. This leads to a multitude of different expressions of wine here, as well as elsewhere in Galicia. Satellite 3-D imagery has been a game changer, but it may be easier to reference topographical maps rather than Google Earth when it comes to climate, since they better and more simply illustrate in the physicality of the landscape, and therefore the source of potential climate influencers. On the west and north end of the Ribeira Sacra the climatic influence is more impacted by Atlantic winds and precipitation due to the absence of any significant mountain range. Toward the west, between the Atlantic and the Ribeiro and Ribeira Sacra regions, some small mountains curb the influence of oceanic winds. Over where the Miño river valley flows south through the Chantada and Ribeiras do Miño subzones of the Ribeira Sacra all the way to the Atlantic, the northern Atlantic winds are freer to blow through the river valley and into the region. Then, toward the south and east the mountains rise to higher altitudes and maintain a much stronger continental influence. None of the mountains in Galicia would be considered big, like the Rockies, Alps or Himalayas—although the Galician range is believed to have been comparable, hundreds of millions of years ago. Now they’re short and rounded, topping out at 2,124 meters (6,969 feet) at Peña Trevinca, perhaps just a dozen or so kilometers to the east of Quiroga-Bibei, the easternmost subzone of the Ribeira Sacra. It snows in the higher elevations in winter, a possibility I hadn’t considered until I found myself driving through an unexpected blizzard from Bierzo to the Amandi on my way to an appointment. It can be downright cold here in the wintertime, and blazing hot in the summer. And the differences between the seasons in the Ribeira Sacra have become particularly extreme of late, with some years overburdened by drought, while also suffering unmanageable mildew pressure, and even torrential hailstorms at the worst possible times, often just before harvest. A Land of Many Rivers The influence of the main rivers in the Ribeira Sacra is not quite the same as it used to be. Since the introduction of hydroelectric dams as early as the 1940s, when Central Hidroeléctrica dos Peares on the 2 Miño River broke ground in ‘47, and with dam construction continuing today along some watercourses, each river’s influence on vineyard microclimates has changed. In the past, rivers brought the advantage of faster moving airflow, especially during spring runoff that likely helped curb frost issues around bud break by basically pulling the cool air further downstream before it could settle in the vineyards. These dams have also brought notable change to the landscape where the deepest sections of the river now run through areas once covered with vineyards, farmland and housing. This modification also undoubtedly altered the local flora and fauna to some degree, as well as untold other factors in the surrounding microclimates. The river currents of old also likely helped to balance temperatures during summer months with their continuous flow of cooler water and fresh mountain air through the valleys on hot days. In some locations rivers now resemble thin, meandering lakes, or mini-fjords, where the water is mostly idle, particularly on the reservoir side of the dams. Today, this dynamic along with the fog it creates increases humidity and encourages mildew’s free run into vineyards on the river valley hillsides, often forcing frequent intervention from growers, inhibiting more efficient and ecologically-sound methods. Rivers alter the topography and create diversity by cutting hundreds of meters deep into the earth, exposing complex geological formations that would’ve otherwise been buried far below the surface. Flatter vineyards have less dramatic variations, and the topsoil often doesn’t correlate exactly with the underlying bedrock as much as it may on steeper hillside vineyards. With other nearby geological formations, the topsoil of vineyards below them can be easily altered with sedimentary deposits from those at higher altitudes. But in the Ribeira Sacra’s river gorges it doesn’t take but a meter or two to shift back and forth from igneous bedrock to metamorphic, just as it does in so many other Galician vineyard areas further into the countryside, away from the Atlantic and the Rías Baixas wine region. What’s more is that inside river gorges like most of those in the Ribeira Sacra, there is an abundant supply of exposures and slope angles. This may be a saving grace for the vineyards near these rivers because as the climate changes the growers can shift from the hottest exposures to cooler ones, while maintaining the same superb bedrock, topsoil and all other characteristics imparted by the local terroir. This practice has already taken hold in the area, with many growers exploring potential vineyard sites that in the past would not have been advantageous. But in the coming decades, these more sheltered sites may provide enough refuge to keep businesses afloat instead of being choked out by the sun. The Grapes There is a lot more insightful information out there on the grapes of Galicia, so I won’t spend too much time in this section. However, I would advise that any interested parties do their research with a wide variety of sources, as I’ve found some inconsistencies in places that I thought would have been more accurate. (Perhaps Jancis Robinson’s book on grapes is the most ideal source.) I will focus on just a few grapes that I find particularly compelling options that regularly demonstrate that they can compete at a very high level. In the right hands and the right terroir inside the Ribeira Sacra, Mencia can render a high- quality wine. The proposed descendant of Caíño and Merenzao (a hard parental pair to imagine, given how dramatically different those two grapes are to Mencia from a finished wine standpoint), it can be dark 3 in color, depending on the vineyard exposure: when well-exposed it can get darker, while with greater protection from the sun the grapes tend to be more red than black—as with most red grapes. It can be suave, supple and convivial; it can also channel the terroir with clarity, as demonstrated by so many examples from the better producers in the region. While Mencia is the most commonly planted grape in the Ribeira Sacra, it is also the most commonly criticized by winegrowers. Their beef with it seems to revolve around its inability to maintain acidity when it reaches its optimal phenolic balance. I’ve been told that its point of origin is likely on the other side of the Galician mountains in the Castilla y Leon, an area where it seems to thrive and maintain solid natural acidity at much higher altitudes. It’s around the Jamuz area where the vines are ancient (more than eighty years old) and grow at altitudes of eight hundred to over a thousand meters, similar to in some higher-altitude areas of Bierzo, where it can also do very well to maintain a decent amount of natural acidity. It’s commonly said that Mencia was not planted in the Ribeira Sacra before phylloxera, but gained ground because of its reliability as a grape, year in and year out. And in a wine region historically as poor as the Ribeira Sacra has been for more than a century, it made complete economic sense—just as when many low-producing grape varieties were ousted all over Europe for other grapes that could generate crops worth growing during hard times. Sadly, many growers feel obliged to manage the low natural acidity of Mencia by adding tartaric acid from a bag—no thanks.